There is no best Talent Management KPI

Imagine your CEO asks you to come up with one KPI he can track to evaluate if your talent management program is successful. Which talent management KPI will you choose?

The example may be hypothetical, but not unrealistic. I know HR executives who have five or seven KPI’s which they discuss with their CEO once a month. One may be on recruitment and one may be on talent management. So if you had to choose one for talent management, which one would it be?

When I talk about one KPI, I don’t mean to say that I think the success of a talent management program can or should be measured by one KPI. Instead I think such a program should be measured by 3-5 KPI’s. No more than that – measuring HR should be simple – but also no fewer than that. But I have experience HR executives who are forced to pick one.

I do believe that you can find one which is the best for you. That is the good news. The bad news is that unfortunately there is not a single generic KPI you can just copy-and-paste. It simply doesn’t work like that. BUT there is a KPI which is best for you.

Just as an aside, if you are looking for the five best generic talent management KPI’s, you can find them here.

Since I cannot offer you the one best talent management KPI, let me instead offer you the process through which you can find it. It is a fairly generic process and you can therefore use it on all types of programs. But will all generic processes; the value is not in the process design itself but in how you conduct the process and what content you bring to it.

It is a four step process:

Identify what problem the talent management program is trying to solve. This is the purpose of the program. Although all programs are talent management programs, they are trying to achieve different things. Some focus on attracting talent, some on retention of talent and some on development and deployment of talent. There is no right or wrong, but which is more important to you?

Imagine that you have implemented your program successfully and it has achieved its purpose, how do you know? What objective, tangible, measurable things have changed? Is it behavioral, attitude or more financial things which have changed? Which one matters most?

Identify what data you have – or can get – to track the program. Most organizations suffer from bad data, wrong data or simply difficult-to-obtain-data. Ignore all of that data. Find the few data that you really need and focus your effort on that. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Define the KPI clearly. It must track the ultimate purpose of the program as well as being easy to monitor and understand. Formulating a KPI is not difficult, but you should follow these best practice steps when formulating it. Most organizations use KPI’s extensively but for most they don’t do what they are meant to do – help you make HR better. They use bad KPI’s

If you follow this simple process you are likely to come up with the one KPI which you can show to your CEO. He (she) will thank you for it.

[…] Imagine your CEO asks you to come up with one KPI he can track to evaluate if your talent management program is successful. Which talent management KPI will you choose? The example may be hypotheti… […]

[…] Imagine your CEO asks you to come up with one KPI he can track to evaluate if your talent management program is successful. Which talent management KPI will you choose? The example may be hypotheti… […]